But no door appeared. A tall, narrow mirror in a silvery frame shimmered briefly into place upon a nearby wall, but it merely sparkled and vanished again a moment later, and the clock sagged back to its former proportions as if exhausted.
‘Thank you for trying,’ said Oriane politely.
Softly, the clock chimed again.
It had not finished. Something else was in the making, for the clock went first very quiet, and the room filled with a heavy sense of tension and potential; then it became very noisy, chiming and clattering, swaying and clunking, and the hands upon all of its thirty-seven faces spun around backwards, slowly at first, and then at such a speed they became a blur.
Oriane scrambled to her feet and stood with her back against the wall, resolved upon keeping as much distance between herself and the struggling clock as possible. ‘Please,’ she begged, when the tumult only grew worse, ‘do not injure yourself!’ And when this entreaty was productive of no alteration in the clock’s behaviour whatsoever, she said more loudly: ‘What is it that you are trying to do?’
The thirty-seven pairs of hands spun and spun and then finally slowed, ticking backwards at a more leisurely pace. When they stopped at last, everything looked rather different.
Oriane herself felt different, too. She felt insubstantial, in some odd way, as though she were turned to mist and wind, only held together in any semblance of her old shape by her own will. The room around her bore a different character, for hanging upon each of its many sides was a long mirror. She quickly grasped that these were as corporeal as she seemed to be herself, for they flickered in a ghostly way, seeming more echoes of mirrors that once were, than solid constructs.
The presence of so many mirrors altered the atmosphere in the room, for the light reflected about so oddly that it seemed much amplified, and Oriane’s eyes watered until she adjusted to the increased brightness. The light shimmered, too, with a brittle quality that reminded her of the Brightening — though it was not, by any means, the same.
And while the tension in the air had diminished, it had given way to a feeling of heightened energy that was almost intolerable. The floor pulsed with it, the walls shivered, and the air sparked. Oriane’s head began to ache.
She counted the mirrors, and found that there were thirty-seven of them… or, no; thirty-six, and one empty space upon the wall.
Then the mirrors washed over with colour, and each blank expanse began to display a scene. Oriane saw such a variety of landscapes as she had never met with before. There was a desert, whose sands glittered as though layered with jewels. There was an ocean of roiling clouds; an exotic forest resplendent with giant flowers; a street full of narrow, tall, thatched houses all jumbled upon on another; a moonlit grove of ancient, wizened trees. There was a vast, scrubby plain baking under a hot sun; a half-ruined palace of white stone, its floors filled with pools of turquoise water; a craggy mountain slope, colonised by white and black goats.
And on it went, through thirty-six variations. Oriane studied each one, fascinated and awed, though when she had completed her perusal of the landscapes she did not feel at all enlightened.
‘I do not understand,’ she said aloud, and her voice came out thin and weak. The clock was trying to show her something, that much was obvious. But what was it? Nothing yet made any sense.
The last mirror before the empty space — the thirty-sixth — flashed and all but jumped off the wall. Oriane drifted nearer. She soon saw that the ballroom she had briefly glimpsed within, with the murals covering its walls and a great, jewelled chandelier hanging from its ceiling, was familiar to her: it was a vision of Laendricourt itself. As she watched, the mirror’s frame twisted and warped, and suddenly it resembled a door’s frame instead. A door appeared, too, an expanse of white-painted wood temporarily obscuring the ballroom beyond. The handle turned, and it swung open.
‘Oh!’ cried Oriane. ‘I see! Can I then go through?’ And she tried, but of course she could not, for there was no substance to her just at present, nor to the mirror either.
‘It used to be a door,’ she concluded, and the clock chimed. ‘These, then, are all doors,’ she said, turning slowly to survey the array of beckoning portals around her. ‘All thirty-six of them! Where do they all go?’ For only the very last was at all familiar to her; the rest showed landscapes she had never seen and could not have imagined, many so alien they could just as well have led to other worlds.
Perhaps they did.
‘But what about this one?’ said Oriane, and laid her hand against the bare expanse of wall that separated the first and the last.
In response, there came a great, shattering sound as of a world breaking in two, and the floor shook beneath her feet. Ashen, Oriane clung to the wall, expecting any moment that the ceiling would cave, and bury her in rubble. But it did not. Instead, an insubstantial mirror glimmered into being in that final, empty spot, and it showed another place that she knew: a ruined ballroom, its ceiling gaping half-open, its bramble-covered walls thick with roses.
Landricourt. Argantel. Her world.
‘Something broke,’ she said, and the clock chimed. ‘My world split from yours, and fell into ruin.’
She appeared to have guessed aright, for the ghostly mirrors faded away, leaving the walls bare once more. Oriane, restored to substance, paced back towards the clock.
A more intent perusal of its clock-faces revealed something she had not noticed before: a twinned pair, one an obvious copy of the other, and a perfect match for the first save that its glass face was cracked through. It also had, puzzlingly, three clock hands: two which told the time in the usual way, and a third pointing always to three o’clock.
It had, she thought, probably pointed to four, until she herself had come in and interfered.
As she watched, that little third hand quivered, and jumped to point to two.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said in dismay. ‘Everything is got quite into confusion, isn’t it?’
The clock chimed, dolefully.
Oriane thought.
‘How did all these mirror-doors come into being? Did you make them?’
A soft chime. Yes.
‘I am sure you did not mean that anything should be broken.’
No.
‘And being a clock, and sequestered in here besides, it is hardly to be expected that you should mend it again. I shall be glad to help, for I do like things to be tidy. But how am I to be of any use, when I am trapped in here with you?’
The clock, it seemed, had no answer to make, for there came no response but silence.
‘Did you bring me here? What am I to do?’
Silence.
Perhaps it was thinking. Oriane thought, too, and only came up with more questions. ‘Who are you?’ she tried. ‘Or, perhaps more rightly, what are you?’
No answer, for a time. And then, just as Oriane was beginning to formulate her next question, she saw a ghost-mirror steal back into place upon the wall before her, and a picture formed within it.
A woman stood there, young and raven-haired. She possessed an air of vigorous energy, and her whole face shone with a confidence and enthusiasm for which Oriane felt a brief stab of envy. She was dressed in fashions Oriane would call outlandish, but which she knew to be common enough in Laendricourt: layered skirts in green and blue, a patterned blouse, and a gauzy, mauve-coloured coat.
The resemblance was not immediately obvious, for the hair was dark, and the face not exactly alike. But it dawned upon Oriane that the woman before her reminded her strongly of Sylvaine Chanteraine.
A second figure materialised in the glass, and Oriane knew it for Pharamond; knew it before the outline of his tall figure was even complete, before the dark colour had seeped into his hair. He was younger by far than Oriane had ever known him, full twenty years younger, if not more. But she knew every line of his familiar face, the curl of his lips as he smiled, the intense quality of his eyes.
‘You are the mother of Sylvaine,’ she said
.
The figures faded from the mirror, and the clock sighed.
With an effort, Oriane set aside all the many implications of this revelation, and kept her mind sternly focused upon the problem she had been offered. To the clock she said, ‘Do you know how to mend your world, and mine?’
There was not time for the clock to formulate an answer, if there was much answer to give, for the sombre quiet in the room was abruptly split apart by a hubbub of voices; there came the sounds of footsteps in quantity, and chatter, and exclaiming in surprise, as several people at once came into the room behind Oriane.
She spun, and there beheld: Florian Talleyrand, sprawled upon the floor as though he had fallen rather than walked into the room, and ended up upon his face; Margot De Courcey, her own friend from Landricourt, looking flushed and surprised and resolved all at once; Ghislain, differently clad from before, and looking both exhilarated and exhausted; and Nynevarre, arm-in-arm with a Pharamond Chanteraine, even as she scolded him.
‘Ah!’ said Florian, looking up at Oriane from his recumbent posture upon the floor. ‘Madame Travere! We had hoped to find you still here.’ He glanced with approval at a tiny painting he held in his hand — a painting which, a mere glimpse informed her, depicted the clock-room to perfection — and then held out the picture to Pharamond, who hesitated, but took it.
‘I am like to be nowhere else ever again,’ said Oriane rather dryly, ‘if I am not got out of this room. It has been my prison for the past day at least.’
‘Terribly sorry,’ said Florian, accepting the hand Margot extended as he picked himself up. ‘We would have come sooner, only it took some little time to organise ourselves into a rescue committee.’
‘Poor Pharamond had to be rescued first,’ said Margot. ‘And Sylvaine and I along with him. And then we came looking for you. And the clock.’
Oriane had not even observed Sylvaine, for she had entered the room so closely behind her father and Nynevarre that she had been scarcely visible. She now stood a little to one side, crestfallen and uncomfortable, her attention all fixed upon the clock behind Oriane.
Pharamond had no eyes for anything but the clock, either.
Nynevarre was looking around with great curiosity, though her lips were pressed into a disapproving line. ‘Aye, my poor dove,’ she said, though whether to Pharamond, Sylvaine or someone else was not clear. ‘Trapped so long in that clock, and none of us could get anywhere near! The mirrors, you know. Heartless baggages, the lot of them. Flatly refused to get into this spot, and no one but you could have managed it, Pharamond. But where were you? Lost, quite lost! A bad business.’
‘Someone else appears to have managed it,’ said Pharamond, and now he looked at Oriane.
‘Yes,’ said Nynevarre, and frowned at Oriane as though she were somehow at fault. ‘I should dearly like to know how, too.’
‘I do not know,’ was all the explanation Oriane could offer. ‘I did not mean to. I was going, I thought, from one room to another, as I had been all day. But I found myself in here, and then I could not get out again.’
‘Some glitch, or oddity,’ said Nynevarre, and shook her head. ‘The veriest luck! If only it had occurred long ago.’
But the clock did not appear satisfied with this conclusion, for it gave a chime, and shuddered.
‘I think she drew me in,’ said Oriane.
‘She?’ said Pharamond, and raised his silvery brows.
‘I know who she is. But I do not know how she came to be trapped in there, or how our — how my world came to be broken off from this one.’ The import of everything she had seen and heard came together in her mind all at once, and it occurred to her, halfway through the sentence, that Pharamond was not of her world at all. He came from Laendricourt, and had lived among the people of Argantel for so long only because he’d had no choice.
Oriane looked hard at him. ‘Did you make all those mirrors? You and your wife?’
‘Thandrian,’ he said. ‘That is her name. And yes, we made them.’
‘You have never mentioned mother’s name before,’ said Sylvaine, and softly repeated it to herself. Thandrian.
‘I could not say it without grave pain,’ he returned, and the expression he wore as he stared at the clock gave Oriane a sharp pain of her own. ‘I tried for more than a year to release her, and to undo what we had wrought. But I failed, and then I was carried away into Argantel — you and I together, Sylvie, when you were but a child. I walked, as I thought, only from my workroom into our parlour, but the door was a mirror, and we never reached the parlour at all.’
‘And I was taken into Laendricourt in your place,’ said Ghislain, who lingered near Margot. ‘Perhaps it was even my doing, for I remember a mirror in the ballroom at Landricourt. It drew me.’
‘They do that,’ said Florian, with a smile of wry complicity for Oriane.
‘They do indeed,’ she murmured. To Pharamond she continued: ‘What happened? How did you break Arganthael, and why is Thandrian a clock?’
Pharamond sighed. ‘It was the work of many years, to create all these mirror-doors,’ he began. ‘We celebrated each victory, for it was no easy matter. Thirty-six mirrors we built, matched to thirty-six clocks, and they led into thirty-six different worlds. We called them the Otherwheres, and we explored each one as broadly as we dared. It was our intention to throw them open to everyone, when we were certain that they were stable, and safe.
‘We grew in confidence, and in power, for so many mirrors assembled all together reflect and amplify all magic. It grows, eventually, to more than the sum of its separate parts, and after we had got so many as thirty-six enchanted glasses together, we… we felt invincible, I suppose. Like there was nothing we could not do, no distance we could not reach past.
‘We went further than we ever had before, tried to forge a link with a world much farther off. And we failed. It got away from us, somehow, all the magic we had so carefully nurtured. It twisted upon itself, and the world cracked in two. One half retained all the magic of both, amplified beyond all proportion and condensed into too confined a space; and the other half lost every drop of magic, every whisper, and withered away.
‘The mirrors were twisted, too. They would no longer answer when we called, would not obey instructions. They took too much of our magics into themselves, became tricksy and mischievous. And so they still are.’
‘Blackguards,’ said Ghislain darkly.
Here Pharamond paused, and looked long at the clock. ‘My wife — Thandrian — thought to use the clock to mend things. It was our tool all along, the means by which we kept track of our thirty-six worlds, the focus of all the magic we had brought to bear upon the project. It kept the mirrors in check, ensured that we were never too long adrift in the Otherwheres to venture back — it did everything. But it did not have power enough to reverse the ill effects of our mistakes, not when the clock was half broken and the mirrors were slipping away. Thandrian thought to lend it all her own power, and use it to wrest our splintered worlds back into harmony. But the clock simply… absorbed her. She never came out.
‘I might have gone in after her, had I not had Sylvie to care for. But there was Sylvie, and I knew Thandrian would never forgive me if I… if I followed her, and never came out either. I tried everything I could, short of that, until I was sundered from her. And I have been waiting for a mirror ever since.’
There followed a tumult, as everybody spoke at once. Some had recriminations to offer (mostly Sylvaine); some had advice to give or suggestions to make (Ghislain, and — loudly — Nynevarre); some offered comfort (specifically, Margot). Only Florian and Oriane were silent, and Florian’s demeanour suggested that his mind was as busy as Oriane’s.
She drifted nearer. ‘You look as though you might have some bright ideas.’
He smiled. ‘As do you.’
‘Will you tell me yours? And I will share mine.’
‘I think we must bring all the mirrors back.’
Oriane nodde
d. ‘Thandrian’s plan was probably sound, do you not think? Only she could not do it alone.’
‘The mirrors will help, if we can only gather them up, and then…’
‘Then some of us must help Thandrian.’
Florian nodded thoughtfully. ‘But how to recall the mirrors, if even their creators cannot?’
‘The Elements,’ said Margot incomprehensibly, who had come up in time to hear most of their conversation. Only she said the word with emphasis, as though it meant more than was apparent.
Florian tilted his head at her in a silent question.
‘Rozebaiel,’ she explained, which did not much enlighten Oriane but appeared to be of more use to Florian. ‘They’re… manifestations, aren’t they? Pure magic! Rozebaiel and Mistral wrestled a mirror into obedience between them. We all came through it. And somehow, it worked more as it should, without dragging people the other way again. I am sure they could help us.’
‘Pure magic,’ mused Florian. ‘That sounds helpful, indeed.’
The plan soon became a general one, once the hubbub of excitement had died down. Nynevarre was overjoyed to learn of Rozebaiel’s return, and promptly said: ‘I will find her, the dear. She won’t hide from me.’
The aid of only two manifestations was unlikely to be enough, if it had taken the combined efforts of both to subdue a single mirror. But Sylvaine said, ‘There are more.’
Margot nodded. ‘We sang about them,’ she explained, about as comprehensibly as she had spoken of Elements before.
‘I see,’ said Oriane.
‘There is Night,’ Sylvaine continued. ‘And the Skies.’
‘And the Rain, Moon and Sun,’ said Margot. ‘That ought to do it, no?’
‘Walkelin might be able to reach the Sky,’ said Ghislain presently.
‘But how to reach Walkelin?’ said Oriane, whose fruitless efforts to retrace her steps to the Wind’s Tower were still fresh in her mind.
‘You have his neckcloth,’ said Florian, and pointed at the pretty thing around her neck. ‘Somehow.’
Oriane had forgotten about it. ‘Ah, I do? Very well, then. Perhaps it will lead me thither. And I may find Mistral there, as well.’
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